Google Is Getting Into Television

A WSJ article recently pointed out that the average person watches television for about 6000 minutes per month, while the average Youtube user watches only about 378 minutes watching video on YouTube. Although this presents a significant challenge to Google it also represents their most significant media opportunity. Just imagine the upside. There is nothing but upside to this play in my opinion.

Google has a lot to gain by going after TV revenues

When you consider that Google has already spent $100 million to get started in online television and has close to $40 billion dollars to spend on initiatives like this it’s easy to see they may very well succeed.

The article points out that from 2008 until now, Google has gone from 2% market share in the mobile phone business (Android) to 56% market share today. So history and market performance suggest that they are likely to make a significant dent in this new market.

And I think they will. Television and cable companies have been getting away with bundling channel for consumers and advertisers for years. Google’s modular and targeted approach to the consumer and advertising markets is likely to begin displacing traditional methods. I suspect the cable and network companies will only react after they’ve lost significant market share in both realms.

So what does that mean for online marketers? I’d suggest that you begin learning more about how to use video for your web sites and landing pages. It is the wave of the future and, in fact, is very important today.

Strictly speaking, it’s going to take a few years for Google to make their way into the living rooms of America via television sets. But the point is that they have a lot of incentive to go after this market. So this means that today, they are focusing more and more on making Youtube (which they own) more important. If your web pages have video on them most experts agree that it can help your rankings.

Another way to think about it is to consider that Google has a DEARTH of information available to it in the form of text. I kind of went off on a tangent to discover how much information is available on the Internet and found this page… if you care.

My point, however, is that, in terms of content (not storage space), there is a lot less video. So Google is likely to care more about video content right now than text content. The long story short is this… If you want to rank better at Google for your keywords and categories, add some video to your pages.

Read the story… | Source: WSJ.com (Note: You may need a subscription to view this content. | Date posted: 11/21/2011